While cleaning up after a successful fishing trip near Biorka Island, southwest of Sitka, on July 20, Vern Culp and Brian Neal felt their 22-foot boat being lifted from underneath.

Neal thought they had hit some rocks until he looked over the side and saw a giant eye, belonging to a humpback whale, looking back.

Nobody was hurt, and Neal said some small marks on the boat were the only signs left from the encounter with the whale.

“It happened so quick. There wasnʼt time to be scared or anything,” Neal said later. “Only five minutes afterward, it slowly started coming to us that we had just been rammed by a whale.”

Neal and Culp had been fishing in a 22-foot Rhino and enjoying a rare sunny day in a rainy summer.

“It was very peaceful, very glorious, very fulfilling. Itʼs always a wonderful day when the weatherʼs nice and the fish are biting. There was no warning,” Culp said.

He estimated the whale lifted the boat about a foot out of the water, and the two men aboard were thrown off balance. He described the absurdity of the situation like “sitting in your lawn chair and having a whale come up.”

“There was this whale and he was looking at us and we were looking at him. And we were wondering, ‘What the heck?ʼ I think he kind of communicated to us that he was wondering the same thing,” Culp said. “And then he suddenly sank and swam out of the way. That was it.”

Neal agreed with Culp about the whale’s peaceful demeanor.

“There was sort of a kindness to the eye, like a softness,” Neal said. “We just bumped into this enormous creature living on this planet. It was really this phenomenal experience. I feel honored to have had it. I felt like we had, for a moment, a connection to this whale. The whale being as shocked as we were, there was this exchange between us that goes beyond words.”

Culp was equally impressed. “The initial moment that it happened, it was just like the world came unglued,” he said. “There was just absolutely no reason at all for that to be happening, because we were not moving in the water.”

He concluded: “We got back and made some of the fish last night, and life is good.”